By Ruth Moreno
Earlier this morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the infamous Equality Act, one of the Democratic Party's most radical pieces of legislation. If passed by the Left's slim majority in the Senate and signed into law by President Biden, the Equality Act would harm society at every level under the guise of fairness.
The Equality Act is anything but fair. Women especially would be harmed by fact that it essentially erases biological womanhood from the legal system. It would harm women's sports by allowing biological men to compete against them, and it would endanger women's safety by allowing biological men who identify as women into women's shelters and prisons. In Wednesday's hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that that the Equality Act would essentially repeal Title IX. He was followed up by journalist Abigail Shrier, who explained that the bill would technically allow even serial rapists to be housed in women's prisons.
Tuesday on "Washington Watch" with Tony Perkins, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) explained who the real beneficiaries of the Equality Act would be. "Instead of establishing equal rights, what this does is to preference individuals who are a biological male who choose to identify as a female," she said.
Blackburn also testified against the bill earlier today, emphasizing that women's safety is fundamental for women's rights. By compromising women's safety for the sake of false equality, the Equality Act would roll back much of the progress America has made in securing women's rights.
The Equality Act will do more than hurt women, though. By adding subjective sexual orientation and gender identity categories to civil rights statutes based immutable characteristics, this piece of legislation would restrict the rights of medical professionals, parents, teachers, students, families (including small business owners), the unborn, churches, religious organizations and schools, and people of faith who do not subscribe to the radical left's gender ideology. In its politicization of healthcare, the Equality Act would complicate patient care in such a way that could even threaten the members of the LGBT community it claims to protect.
Senator Chuck Grassley told the Senate Judiciary Committee to be wary of the intended -- and unintended -- consequences of the Equality Act. "I strongly suspect that it actually would dictate what women, girls, schools, churches, doctors and others must believe," he told the committee. Grassley also pointed out that it would serve the Senate well to hear from physicians whose professional judgment could be compromised by the federal government as a result of the Equality Act.
Even the First Amendment rights to free speech and religious freedom are caught up in the Equality Act and everything it implies. Provisions within the Equality Act would override the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an important piece of legislation which has protected the rights and liberties of religious Americans since 1993.
Grassley explained that the Equality Act's conflict with religious freedom could limit much of the good religious organizations do for society. If signed into law, provisions within the Equality Act could mandate federal discrimination against religiously-affiliated hospitals, for instance, which may have conscience objections to the radical worldview imposed upon all by the Equality Act.
"In some areas these [religious] facilities may be the only hospitals for miles around," Grassley told the committee. "If a faith-based organization has partnered with a community to provide very needed social services that would otherwise not exist like a soup kitchen or an adoption agency for the hard to adopt special need kids. What happens to the people who rely most heavily on those services? To whom do they turn?"
And of course, again under the guise of fairness, the Equality Act would create a legislative right to abortion and force physicians to provide, and insurance agencies to cover, abortions and other treatments and surgeries surrounding reproductive healthcare even if it violated their consciences to do so.
The Equality Act is a radical piece of legislation that would expand the Civil Rights Act into something unrecognizable to those who fought for the rights of black Americans in the 1960s. This bill is about far more than LGBT-identifying Americans, who are already entitled to the same rights as all Americans under the Constitution -- including dignity and respect insofar as they are children of God. But the Equality Act prioritizes a false equality mandated by an overreaching government over the good of all Americans, especially women and the religiously observant. Left or Right, U.S. senators concerned with the rights and safety of all Americans should vote against this dangerous piece of legislation. Contact your senators and urge them to vote NO.
